marijuana

In anticipation of the Vermont’s likely legalization of marijuana, the state’s drug-sniffing police dogs are no longer being trained to recognize the plant’s smell, reports Ganjapreneur and others.

Robert Ryan, head K-9 training coordinator for Vermont, told The Times Argus that the change was actually first proposed last year, though not put into effect until this year’s course.

Currently, Vermont is poised to become one of the first states in the nation to legalize cannabis through legislative action, not a voter initiative. Legislation to such an end is expected to soon appear in the state Senate for discussion.

Cannabis, because of its potent odor, is easier than most other substances for dogs to learn to detect, Ryan explained. “If for some reason it doesn’t become legalized, it’s an odor that [dogs] can be trained to alert on later,” he said.

“The dogs that are already trained to smell marijuana are still going to be used,” Ryan said, though they would be reserved only for situations where cannabis would still be worth detecting — like prisons and public schools, for example.

At Oaksterdam University in Oakland, Calif., a grow tent has different strains of cannabis plants used for demonstration purposes. (Peter DaSilva/For The Washington Post)

By Sara Solovitch

The Washington Post

OAKLAND, Calif. – Jean Kennedy has a BS in biology and a master’s in special education. Now, she’s trying to decide what to do with her third degree: a certificate of achievement from Oaksterdam University, the Harvard Business School of marijuana.

“I’m Italian,” said Kennedy, 56, a retired high school biology teacher with graying hair and a heavy New York accent. “You know Italians, we grow tomatoes. Maybe I’ll grow some plants.”

Horticulture 102 is one of the many subjects Kennedy studies at Oaksterdam, whose storefront campus is set amid the hip cafes, restaurants and cannabis dispensaries of downtown Oakland. Founded in 2007, the school sees itself as a training ground for citizen advocates in the fight to legalize marijuana.

Oaksterdam is rebounding after a 2012 raid by the federal government, which deems marijuana a Schedule 1 illegal drug, the same category as heroin. Federal agents, many of them masked and armed, broke down the doors of the school with battering rams and sledgehammers, carting away an estimated 60,000 cannabis plants and scattering the school’s terrified faculty and students.

The university was devastated by the raid, which Oaksterdam founder Richard Lee dismissed as a “last-ditch effort” by federal authorities to enforce marijuana laws that were out of step with the times. Medical marijuana was approved by California voters in 1996. In the years since the raid, four states and the District of Columbia have legalized pot, making marijuana a legitimate business in many parts of America, worth an estimated $3.5 billion a year.

Still, as Oaksterdam preaches the gospel of pot entrepreneurism, its history offers a lesson in harsh reality. Robert Raich, a lawyer who has twice argued legalization cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, makes that lesson explicit in Cannabusiness 102, where he warns students of the risk inherent in cultivating a Schedule 1 drug.

“Until the federal government changes the Controlled Substances Act,” Raich said, “I teach how to create defenses against possible hostile action by the government.”

Business at Oaksterdam is booming despite that risk. Today, the school employs 20 staff members and 150 instructors, including some of the biggest stars in the cannabis universe. Debby Goldsberry co-founded the Berkeley Patients Group medical cannabis collective, and Ed Rosenthal is often cited as the world’s leading authority on marijuana cultivation. The Oakland lecture hall holds 50 students and every seat is paid for.

The school is also branching out to satellite locations. There is a new campus in the works in Las Vegas, where two four-day seminars sold out this year, with 250 students paying as much as $995 apiece.

Last month, the school conducted a conference in Orlando, where about 300 doctors and nurses earned continuing education credits after learning to use cannabis to treat an array of medical conditions, including glaucoma and glioblastoma.

And the school routinely advises politicians from places including California and Jamaica on topics such as how to appraise applications for medical marijuana and dispensary licenses, and how to promote marijuana research and development.

At the main campus, the walls display photos of the school’s 23,000 graduates, who range in age from 18 to 65 and represent every state and 30 countries. Last month, about 30 California lawmakers drove from Sacramento for lectures on taxation and regulation, studying up for the possible passage next fall of an initiative that would legalize marijuana for recreational use.

Aseem Sappal, the school’s provost and dean, said he wants to build Oaksterdam’s credibility as a serious institution of higher learning.

“We have high school grads sitting next to oncologists and city council members. We have senators, governors, former congressmen – this is who we’re working with,” Sappal said. “We have skepticism because it’s a big joke, people just smoking pot. But the country is moving in this direction for a reason.”

As the legalization movement grows, Oaksterdam is even attracting students who say they have never smoked pot. One is Kennedy, the retired biology teacher, whose primary interest is in the plant’s medicinal benefits.

“My own sister thinks I’ve lost my mind,” she said. “But these are not crazy people. These are not potheads. When you come here, you see it: These are businesspeople.”

Kennedy is enrolled in the Classic Semester – 35 credit hours of basic and advanced classes during which an instructor lectures on the history and politics of cannabis, the plant’s nutritional and water requirements, its medical benefits, culinary delights and methods of ingestion.

There are also classes on economics, business management, legal rights and cannabusiness. One of the messages implicit in an Oaksterdam education is that there is a lot of money waiting to be made.

“But it has to be done in a responsible, politically astute way,” stressed Chris Conrad, who lectures on cannabis history and politics. He is the author of several books on the subjects, and he has testified as an expert witness in hundreds of state, federal and military trials.

“Oaksterdam has helped people understand that cannabis is just another business,” he said. “They don’t let you sell a hamburger without a license, and they won’t let you sell marijuana without a license.”

That makes sense to Chris Bergan, 22. About a year ago, Bergan dropped out of West Chester University in West Chester, Pa., to go into medical marijuana delivery.

“Business took off, and I started making way more than I would ever have with my English degree,” said Bergan, who runs his business entirely on his iPhone.

Oaksterdam offers a superior education as well, Bergan said.

“Over the last month, I’ve learned more about something I’ve been consuming since I was 14 than in all the years in between. It’s an incredible education. Did you know that there are 22,000 peer-reviewed studies on marijuana in the medical literature? I had no idea.”

The business potential of pot looms large at Oaksterdam. Australia is on the verge of approving medical marijuana. Canada is expected to legalize recreational use for adults. And a new study by CBRE Research, a commercial real-estate research company, shows that pot has powered the Denver real-estate market since Colorado legalized marijuana in recent years.

From 2009 to 2014, a third of new industrial space leases in the city were for marijuana cultivation.

Bergan says he hardly knows which prospects to pursue first. Whatever he decides, Oaksterdam says it is there to help.

“You have no idea how many people come here and end up going into partnership with someone they meet,” Sappal said. “If there’s a student in a class of 50 who’s an electrician, that’s a tremendous opportunity for networking. Because when you have an indoor grow, who’s going to set it up? You want someone who’s friendly.”

When Lee founded Oaksterdam in 2007, there was no place like it in America. A paraplegic who smoked pot to prevent leg spasms, Lee was a strong advocate for legalizing, regulating and taxing medical marijuana.

Then he went to Amsterdam, where he noticed “a teaching thing called Cannabis College, a little cultivation place next to one of the seed companies.” Back in Oakland, he placed a classified ad in the back of an alternative newspaper and, “as soon as the paper hit the racks, the phone started ringing.”

Thus, Oaksterdam – an amalgam of Oakland and Amsterdam – was born.

The school quickly grew to include 100 instructors on a 30,000-square-foot campus. But it also became a federal target. To save Oaksterdam – and himself – Lee cut off all involvement with the school and its related businesses, which include a dispensary and a plant nursery.

Although Oaksterdam never closed, it lost its lease and was forced to relocate from its old three-story building to a much smaller storefront. Its staff shrank overnight from 53 to three.

Ultimately, no charges were filed against Lee or the university. These days, he mostly works alongside his mother, Ann Lee, who in 2012 founded Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition.

And the school is so much a part of local politics that Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf (D) held a fundraiser at Oaksterdam a few weeks before her election last year. Meanwhile, students are once again pouring in from all across the nation.

On a recent morning, instructor John Geluardi addressed 42 students in a lecture hall crowded with grow tents packed with pungent plants under full-spectrum lights. When Geluardi asked how many people were from California, three students raised their hands.

Geluardi is a journalist and the author of “Cannabiz: The Explosive Rise of the Medical Marijuana Industry.” He teaches economics, predicting boom times to come if marijuana is legalized and taxed nationwide.

But those riches will be harder to realize until Congress changes the Controlled Substances Act, Geluardi said.

“Federal law makes it very difficult to do business. If you’re running a medical cannabis dispensary, you’re always on tenterhooks,” he told his students.

“Becoming a white market economy,” he said, would be “cannabis heaven.”

Hemp plants tower above researchers who tend to them at a University of Kentucky research farm. Test plots of hemp were on display on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015, as about 250 people visited the research farm at Lexington, Ky. (AP Photo/Bruce Schreiner)

For more than 100 years, Jane Harrod’s family set aside a corner of their farm to grow tobacco. The 20 acres they grew when she was a girl was only a fraction of the 400 acres the family owned outside Lexington, Ky., but it promised good money, about $1,000 an acre.

“Most all of us farmers raised some tobacco,” said Harrod, 63. “Tobacco definitely put the clothes on our backs when we were kids.”

But tobacco isn’t the reliable cash crop it once was. That has Harrod and hundreds of other farmers across the South revisiting a plant from deep in the region’s past: industrial hemp.

Known as marijuana’s non-potent cousin, hemp is not likely to replace the billions of dollars that tobacco once provided, but proponents such as Harrod say they’re willing to take a chance on a crop they hope will breathe new life into the South’s family farms.

Those efforts have faced resistance from law enforcement groups that worry that hemp farms could be hiding acres of marijuana, which would become harder to detect.

The South has largely resisted legalizing pot, even for medical use. (Medical marijuana is legal in 23 states and recreational pot is legal in four.) But in states where tobacco once reigned supreme, industrial hemp has come back into vogue.

Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia are among the 20 states that have enacted laws allowing researchers and farmers to revive the long-forbidden plant. And late last month, the North Carolina legislature approved a proposal to do the same; that bill is on the governor’s desk.

University of Kentucky agronomis David Williams, right, speaks to media after a small plot of hemp was harvested at a University of Kentucky farm near Lexington, Ky. The 2015 Spring planting season included several hundred acres of industrial hemp. (AP Photo/Dylan Lovan, File)

The end of federal subsidies for tobacco in 2004 and decreasing popularity of smoking have wiped out much of the crop’s prominence and profitability. The United States grew $1.8 billion worth of tobacco in 2014, a far cry from its peak in 1981, when the country produced $3.5 billion worth, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In Kentucky, 60,000 farms once grew some tobacco, mostly family farmers looking to make extra money, said Will Snell, an agricultural economist at the University of Kentucky. Now, just 4,500 do, as large-scale production has taken on a bigger role and family farmers have been pushed out of the business.

Hemp’s backers acknowledge that the plant probably won’t completely fill the gap left by tobacco, but they hope it will give farmers such as Harrod a new, potentially lucrative option.
The Hemp Industries Association estimates that Americans bought $620 million worth of hemp products last year — including clothing, building materials and food made with hemp seeds, said Eric Steenstren, the industry group’s executive director.

“It’s not the replacement, but it’s part of the solution,” said James Comer, Kentucky’s agriculture commissioner, a Republican who sponsored the state’s hemp bill when he was in the legislature.

The crop has set off something of a gold rush in states such as Kentucky, where hundreds have applied for permits to grow it, Comer said.

Harrod said she will apply to grow five acres next year. She and her siblings stopped growing tobacco in 2002 as the crop was in decline and their mother died of lung cancer. Other alternatives, such as vegetables, hogs and cattle, haven’t made up the difference.

Hemp’s relationship with marijuana has helped fuel some of the interest in the crop. The two plants are different varieties of the same species, Cannabis sativa, but instead of a high, hemp can be turned into material used in clothes and building materials.

Supporters pitch hemp as something of a miracle crop — a plant that can be used to make, among other things, car parts and cannabidiol oil, a chemical that’s thought to help people with severe epilepsy.

Hemp once reigned in the South. Harrod, the Kentucky farmer, says her grandfather grew it during World War II. She figures her ancestors grew it back to her farm’s founding in 1804. But it hasn’t been grown widely since the 1950s.

“We used to believe in this plant so much,” said Tennessee state Rep. Jeremy Faison, a Republican who sponsored the state’s bill to legalize the plant. “In the Southeast, you’re going to see it be a part of our future, just like it was a part of our past.”

Still, the politics haven’t always been cut-and-dry.

State lawmakers have complained that resistance from federal law enforcement has slowed the plant’s reintroduction and kept farmers from planting their seeds on time.

(The Drug Enforcement Agency referred questions to the Department of Justice; a department spokesman didn’t return a request for comment.)

When Kentucky’s pilot program hit such roadblocks, it took Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican who represents the state, to clear a pathway for research in the 2014 federal farm bill.After South Carolina passed a hemp bill last year, the pilot program it was supposed to create never materialized. The Legislature’s bill didn’t specify which agency should set it up.So lawmakers this year proposed a bill to fill in the gap. It quickly met opposition from the State Law Enforcement Division, which feared hemp could give cover to growers hoping to furtively grow marijuana. The bill never left committee. (The agency declined an interview request.)In North Carolina, state Sen. Stan Bingham, a Republican, faced similar opposition when he pitched industrial hemp a few years back. When police groups came out against the bill, he dropped the issue.“I just gave up on it because I couldn’t get it passed,” Bingham said.

But this year, he tried again. Looser federal rules on hemp helped ease the process, and the law enforcement groups didn’t put up a fight. It passed the Legislature last month by a large margin.

“They had some very conservative members that I would’ve thought would’ve voted against this no matter what, but they didn’t. They saw the job opportunities,” Bingham said. “There’s just a lot of things that can be done with this, and I hope we’ll have a bright future.”

The “Best Bud” category now joins the fair’s growing list of competitions, which already includes the honey contest, the homebrew contest, the knit and crotchet contest, the funkiest-looking vegetable contest, the pickled food contest and more.

“Now that it’s legal for residents of the District to grow their own plants, we wanted a way to highlight this new freedom whil

e also showing off the agricultural talents of the District’s people,” Anna Tauzin, a board member and outreach director for the fair, wrote in an e-mail. The event is held each year in September. D.C. State Fair is a nonprofit run by residents.

Those interested in entering the contest will need to submit a 1-2 gram bud from their home-grown marijuana in a Mason jar. The sample will not be smoked by the judges, but rather will be judged on its odor, touch, and appearance — such as the presence of crystals on the bud. Judges will also take into account how the marijuana was grown, as well as other details about the grower’s technique.

SARASOTA COUNTY — In November – when Florida’s medical marijuana amendment came up two points short of the 60 percent approval that would give it the force of constitutional law – AltMed LLC was forced to confront an uncomfortable truth.

Bhang Corporation makes and markets cannabis-infused chocolates and is working on a deal to produce more traditional medical delivery systems, such as transdermal patches with AltMed LLC of Sarasota.Photo provided by Bhang Corporation.

With no backup plan, the Sarasota County-based startup had become somewhat of an orphan: a would-be marijuana provider in a state that may or may not have a full-fledged medical program by 2018.

“We came in and sat down and had a little pity party for three or four hours, because we had never really planned for that,” said Michael Smullen, co-chairman of the board at AltMed, which now occupies an artfully decorated former showroom for granite countertops and floors in eastern Sarasota County. (A large production area is still sub-leased for granite work, but the eventual plan is to use that space to process and package cannabis products.)

During the run-up to the Amendment 2 vote, and in anticipation of an even sooner shot at one of five state licenses to make and process a non-euphoric extract used to treat epilepsy, AltMed had been recruiting key personnel. Within the office, the company now employs a medical director, an accountant, a lawyer, an organic chemist and an expert at growing high-value marijuana while following all the rules and regulations evolved in the 23 states where it is legal.

AltMed executives will decide this month whether to submit an application to grow, process and sell the extract — an effort that would provide good experience, and might grandfather the Sarasota County company into a potential future where there is more broad-based legal production in the Sunshine State.

But is not a way to make money.

Following the amendment’s defeat, the question on that financial front became: “How can we do something that provides revenues before Florida passes a law, without all of us going to jail?” said CEO David P. Wright, Smullen’s fellow founder.

The answer has been to create a careful corporate structure and use it to invest in two states that already have solid, ongoing medical marijuana programs. Wright said there is a constant flow of deals like this for companies like AltMed with the capital to invest. The real issue was trying to choose quality projects that put the company in league with other players that share its emphasis on marijuana as medicine.

Smullen, who became senior vice president of sales and marketing at a high-flying Nasdaq-traded bio-pharmaceutical firm, felt firsthand the agony of raising a daughter who experienced epileptic seizures.

He became a convert to the value of marijuana as a potential balm when he watched CNN documentaries on the subject by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in late 2013. Marijuana also has been shown to alleviate the fatigue and loss of appetite caused by chemotherapy, to reduce the tremors experienced by those with Parkinson’s disease. and to reduce pain — and possibly even the swelling — of arthritis.

Smullen had found an early ally in this vision to grow medical marijuana in Bill Petron, a friend and Ontario entrepreneur who owns a successful farm and construction equipment business.

To round out his team, Smullen turned to Wright, who had worked at the same biopharmaceutical firm and who also retired early to Sarasota.

With plenty of well-heeled friends, AltMed has found it relatively easy to raise more than $5 million from outside investors. The company plans to seek a like amount in the near future, Wright said.

“While these things are not cheap to do, they are going to have returns that are very, very rapid, and that is what we are looking for right now” Wright said. “We are looking to generate cash flow.”

Before the end of 2015, the cash should be flowing from a large indoor growing and processing plant in the small town of Coolidge, Arizona. With 60,000 square feet of growing space, the building will be one of the largest, if not the largest, in Arizona.

The operator, Agronomy Innovations, expects to begin moving plants into the building within a few weeks, and to be harvesting 100 pounds or more of usable cannabis leaves and buds per month by the end of the year.

AltMed will use its new status as a significant industry participant to make and market new lines of cannabis products, including edibles and a transdermal patch designed to deliver the active ingredients from marijuana into the blood stream through contact with the skin.

Meanwhile, discussions also are underway for a similar growing/processing venture in Colorado.

Because Florida has no marijuana program, being based in the state and working in others where cannabis is legal has its own built-in risks that must be carefully managed.

“For those willing to take a risk in the industry, the path will undoubtedly be encumbered with traps putting investors in imminent danger of running afoul with the law,” said David Welch, whose Los Angeles law firm specializes in business aspects of the medical marijuana industry. “Investors still have a misconception that marijuana is legal, when in reality it remains illegal under federal law. That said, an investor who can commit for a long term has the potential to reap significant returns when the law changes, while at the same time avoiding substantial legal implications.”

It is 113 degrees in the shade on a recent weekday in Coolidge, Arizona, as Ray Helbe — driving around in his car — explains how he made the transition from straitlaced NASA aerospace engineer to indoor marijuana specialist.

Like Smullen, a situation within Helbe’s own family changed the way he viewed the drug.

His wife, Danielle, became ill with breast cancer, which spread to her lymph nodes. Their son Nathan, 26, started making and providing her with a thick brown marijuana extract known as “Rick Simpson Oil,” which can be taken orally.

The medicine helped Danielle make it through both radiation and chemotherapy. While making absolutely no claim that marijuana is a cure, the family happily reports that Danielle is now cancer-free.

“She had no bad days when she was going through her treatment,” Helbe said. “It really opened my eyes.”

The father-and-son team got involved in helping others build three different marijuana-growing operations in Arizona, which has had a medical marijuana program in place since 2012.

Along with an old Marine Corps friend who now lives in Phoenix, the Helbes then decided to go into business themselves. Ray Helbe went all-in, cashing his 401(k) to convert a vacant 33,000-square foot building within the city limits of Coolidge into an ultra-modern, high-capacity marijuana operation with growing space on two levels.

While outsiders might consider Coolidge to be in the middle of nowhere, Ray Helbe notes that it is conveniently halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona’s two largest cities.

The Agronomy Innovations team expects to deliver its first crops before the end of the year. Because they are making concentrates, they can use more of the marijuana plant than if they were just selling the cured flower buds for smoking. Helbe figures he could eventually produce 1,000 pounds per month of usable plant material.

Cutting in AltMed for 15 percent ownership was a win-win. It will allow the Helbes’ company to ramp up faster and utilize the highest of high-technology gear.

“Everything can be checked on your smartphone,” Helbe said. “I can check relative humidity. I can add CO2 to a room.”

Once the Coolidge operation starts delivering plant material, the plan is for AltMed to process it and refine it into medicines, including the active ingredient in its transdermal patch.

Back at the former granite showroom in Sarasota County, Wright pulls three small product containers carrying the logo “Bhang” out from his desk drawer, carefully noting to his visitor as he does so that the containers are empty.

Bhang Corp.’s brand name already has become well known in medical marijuana circles for cannabis-infused chocolates, vaporizer pens and sprays. The company is actively producing and marketing products in six states, and will be operating in nine by the end of the year, Bhang CEO Scott Van Rixel says.

“Bhang has asked us to be their medicinal discovery arm,” Wright told the Herald-Tribune.

Van Rixel confirmed the arrangement, saying his company approached AltMed because of Wright’s and Smullen’s pharmaceutical product development experience.

“You get into the patches, pills, inhalers, nebulizers, tinctures,” Van Rixel said. “Things a doctor would see as more comfortable than saying, ‘Eat two cookies and call me in the morning.’”

AltMed hired an organic chemist to come up with what it feels is a more effective transdermal delivery system than those already on the market. Arizona medical marijuana patients will be the first to try them out.

For the Sarasota County company, the experience gained in Arizona and Colorado may bring benefits that can be translated back into the company’s home state as well.

It is very likely that the same group that promoted the medical marijuana amendment in 2014 will be back on the ballot in November 2016 with a very similar measure.

If they succeed, that would mean Florida, the third-most populated state in the nation, would become a multibillion-dollar market for cannabis, and particularly for easy-to-use products like AltMed’s patch.

“It’s a smart move for somebody who has eyes on going for a license of their own in a new state,” said industry consultant Kris Krane, managing partner of 4Front Advisors.

When Erik Christiansen started smoking pot, he became fascinated by the look of different marijuana strains. But the photographs of marijuana he saw didn’t capture the variety, reports NPR.org.

So he went to the hardware store and picked up two lights and a cardboard box. “I didn’t even have a macro lens — I was shooting through a magnifying glass,” he says.

Christiansen has created high-resolution 360-degree views of some strains of marijuana, including this one of Platinum Bubba.

Credit: Courtesy of Erik Christiansen

The California-based photographer tinkered with his macro technique until he had created a consistent way to capture highly detailed images of marijuana.

Then Dan Michaels, a cannabis aficionado and strategist for the growing legal pot industry, contacted Christiansen about collaborating on a field guide. The result is Green: A Field Guide to Marijuana (Chronicle Books, $30). The high-end coffee table book documents over 170 strains of cannabis, explaining their medicinal and recreational attributes. (Though it’s worth noting that the medicinal benefits are based on subjective reports rather than randomized clinical trials.)

“Marijuana candies, sold on the street as ‘Uncle Tweety’s Chewy Flipper’ and ‘Gummy Satans’ are taking the country by storm.” That’s the breathless opening sentence of a news story posted on the Web site of D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the infamous anti-drug organization that sends police into schools to teach kids about the dangers of drug use.

After a Washington Post reporter called to inquire about it, D.A.R.E. removed the story immediately without commenting. But it’s been preserved at the Internet Archive.

“In addition to posts of original content, we re-post on the D.A.R.E. website articles of interest to our stakeholders. Our news-feed service provides us with access to approximately 4,400-4,500 news stories per month. On March 30, 2015, we re-posted a story entitled ‘Edible Marijuana Kills 9 in Colorado and 12 at Coachella.’ The article in question was attributed to Haywood Bynum III with topekanews.com cited as the site of original publication.

“On May 4, 2015, it was brought to our attention that the article in question was not a true news story, but a “satire”. The article was removed from the D.A.R.E. website,” the organization said.

Here is some of what D.A.R.E. inadvertently ran:

“It is sad that in a country as developed as America, such third world drugs such as marijuana are allowed to exist,” the story’s anonymous author wrote. “Children are being addicted to marijuana. I knew this day would come, when a liberal president allowed a state to legally sell Marijuana Flintstone Vitamins to children.”

“Marijuana. It is one of the most dangerous drugs on Earth,” the author concludes ominously. “For every one joint of marijuana, four teenagers become burdened with pregnancy.”

The people at D.A.R.E. reposted the entire story from topekasnews.com. The only problem is that topekasnews.com is a satire Web site, one of dozens posting fake-but-just-barely-believable stories online. The marijuana story is fake, as are the numbers it cites.

These fake news sites are everywhere, and they’re a pox on the Internet as a whole. D.A.R.E. certainly isn’t the first outlet to be taken in by one. But the calculus becomes different when you’re an organization ostensibly dedicated to educating the public on a given topic.

Former U.S. Marine Sgt. Ryan Begin smokes medical marijuana at his home in Belfast, Maine. Begin had his right elbow blown off by a roadside bomb in 2004 and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Loretta Lynch as U.S. Attorney General, five months after her nomination by President Barack Obama. Meanwhile, the Justice Department said Tuesday that Michele Leonhart will step down from her role as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration next month.

Leonhart, who is leaving amid a scandal over DEA agents engaging in sex parties with prostitutes supplied by drug cartels, is known to be a steadfast opponent of marijuana legalization who once refused to say whether or not she believed marijuana to be safer than crack cocaine or heroin. While Leonhart’s successor is unknown, her departure on its own is likely to be cheered by the emerging cannabis industry and proponents for the drug’s widespread legalization.

Meanwhile, Lynch, who will succeed Eric Holder as head of the Justice Department and the nation’s top law enforcement officer, is known to be politically liberal. But she is not expected to be as open-minded as Holder when it comes to marijuana legalization.

Holder has mostly stayed out-of-the-way of the 23 states that have legalized medical marijuana (four states and D.C. legalized recreational pot). He had also expressed a willingness to consider removing marijuana from the list of Schedule 1 drugs, the designation for those that are considered the most dangerous.

This Afghani Kush cannabis plant was grown by Ben Holmes of Centennial Seeds in LaFayette, Colorado. The pure cannabis indica genetic material from this crop is being used in the Cannabis Genomic Research Initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder as part of a project to map the cannabis genome. (STAFF PHOTO / MICHAEL POLLICK)

Last Tuesday, a radio host asked Chris Christie how, if he were elected president, he would handle states that legalize marijuana.

“I will crack down and not permit it,” he said stridently. His reasoning was simple.

“Marijuana is a gateway drug,” the New Jersey governor confidently asserted. “We have an enormous addiction problem in this country. And we need to send very clear leadership from the White House on down through the federal law enforcement. Marijuana is an illegal drug under federal law. And the states should not be permitted to sell it and profit from it.”

But Christie’s claim is being met with skepticism, and not just by the millions of Americans waking and baking this 4/20 morning. (April 20, or 4/20, is celebrated by cannabis enthusiasts around the world.) Almost a century after the “gateway” theory first terrified some Americans, its validity is under assault.

The idea that marijuana leads Americans to harder drugs and eventual ruin dates back to Harry Anslinger. In 1937, the nation’s first drug czar warned that pot could turn us all into potential killers. “How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries and deeds of maniacal insanity it causes each year, especially among the young, can only be conjectured,” he wrote, according to The Atlantic. “No one knows, when he places a marijuana cigarette to his lips, whether he will become a joyous reveler in a musical heaven, a mad insensate, a calm philosopher, or a murderer.”

That same year, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which made it practically illegal to smoke weed. But as marijuana use rose in the 1960s, America actually moved toward more lenient laws. In 1972, a bipartisan commission appointed by President Richard Nixon recommended decriminalizing the drug. (Nixon ignored it.)

By the late 1970s, America was becoming more conservative again. And with First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign in the 1980s, the gateway theory became widespread. D.A.R.E. programs across the country warned schoolchildren that taking that first toke would send them spiraling down into addiction.

There are some studies that show marijuana use is associated with using more serious drugs later in life. In a widely publicized 2014 experiment, neuroscientists found that marijuana use was correlated with “exposure-dependent alterations of the neural matrix of core reward systems” in the brains of young smokers that could conceivably lead to addictions to harder drugs.

But “correlation does not mean causation,” sociology professor Miriam Boeri wrote recently on The Conversation under the headline, “Why are politicians still referring to marijuana as a gateway drug.” Moreover, many of the most widely quoted studies claiming marijuana is a gateway drug — including the 2014 experiment — have been challenged, Boeri wrote. Citing more recent studies, she argued that poverty, social environment, association with hard drug users, and mental illness are actually much better predictors of hard drug use. “Crime has not increased in states that have legalized marijuana; it’s actually gone down. Surprisingly, opiate overdose deaths have gone down as well,” she said. “If anything, marijuana can work as a gateway out of hard drug use.”

“The risk of other illicit drug use in cannabis users may be higher because few people try hard drugs prior to trying cannabis and not because cannabis actually causes the use of harder drugs,” Michelle Taylor, a researcher studying marijuana at the University of Bristol, echoed in The Guardian. “Therefore, observed associations could be the result of societal ordering and availability of drug.”

When asked anonymously, pot smokers themselves reject the gateway drug idea. A 2013 survey of habitual marijuana smokers found that less than 20 percent agreed with the idea of pot being a gateway drug. Almost twice as many disagreed.

Despite the debatable science, politicians like Christie keep insisting that marijuana is a gateway drug as if it’s a given. That’s probably more a question of politics than sound public policy, Boeri and Taylor suggest.

Some researchers now say that the real gateway drug is already legal: nicotine.

Denise Kandel, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, coined the term “gateway drug” back in 1975. Even back then, however, she was more concerned about nicotine than marijuana.

In a recent study on mice, Kandel and her husband, Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Eric Kandel, found scientific evidence of nicotine’s role in hard drug addiction.

“Nicotine acts as a gateway drug on the brain, and this effect is likely to occur whether the exposure is from smoking tobacco, passive tobacco smoke, or e-cigarettes,” they concluded. “More effective prevention programs need to be developed for all the products that contain nicotine, especially those targeting young people. Our data suggest that effective interventions would not only prevent smoking and its negative health consequences but also decrease the risk of progressing to illicit drug use and addiction.”

To his credit, Christie wants to crack down on e-cigarettes, too. But that has less to do with them being a gateway drug than it does New Jersey’s $1 billion budget gap: a shortfall that would go up in smoke if New Jersey legalized marijuana.

President Barack Obama listened as Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi speaks during their news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, April 17, 2015. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

In an interview that will air for the first time this weekend as part of CNN’s latest installment of its medical marijuana documentary series “WEED 3,” President Barack Obama signals support for medical marijuana and for rolling back the federal government’s war on drugs, reports the Huffington Post.

CNN’s chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, a vocal supporter of the legalization of medical marijuana, asks Obama in the documentary if he supports the goals of a historic Senate bill introduced in March that seeks to make several major changes in federal law, including drastically reducing the federal government’s ability to crack down on state-legal medical marijuana programs, encouraging more research into the plant and reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug.

“You know, I think I’d have to take a look at the details,” Obama began in response, “but I’m on record as saying that not only do I think carefully prescribed medical use of marijuana may in fact be appropriate and we should follow the science as opposed to ideology on this issue, but I’m also on record as saying that the more we treat some of these issues related to drug abuse from a public health model and not just from an incarceration model, the better off we’re going to be.”